White smoke wafted above the steeples of Harvard Yard today as Harvard announced its new president: Lawrence Bacow, who spent ten years as president of nearby Tufts and 24 years as a professor at nearby MIT.

The Crimson reports Harvard has upped its proposed contribution for the West Station commuter-rail and bus station inside its proposed 14-acre innovation district where the Allston train yard used to be from $30 million to $50 million. Read more.

Managers at Guilt on Warrenton Street had to explain to the Boston Licensing Board today how a 19-year-old Harvard student wound up requiring an ambulance ride to the hospital for extreme ethanol poisoning on Dec. 1, while the owner of T's Pub on Commonwealth Avenue had to explain how a 19-year-old BU student managed to get a rum and ginger ale on Nov. 28. Read more.

The Crimson reports the medical school hopes to sell 8 of the 11 floors in a building it owns at 4 Blackfan Circle in the Longwood Medical Area. The money will help reduce the school's debt and, if enough comes in, let it stop drawing down its endowment to pay for operations.

Atlas Obscura reports on a Harvard economics major who figured out new meanings for khipus - the knotted strings used by the Inca for record keeping that had long eluded detailed understanding by scholars.

Harvard today filed plans with the BPDA for a large mixed-use development on 14 acres of its Allston land - near where the state recently put off any plans for a new commuter-rail station - plans that include access to a new station on the Worcester Line that just last week state planners said they wanted to put off until at least 2040. Read more.

The owner of Wonder Bar, 178 Harvard Ave., acknowledged today that he and his staff need to do better after police detectives on a routine inspection found six underage college students with mixed drinks at a reserved table after the Head of the Charles Regatta last month. Read more.

The Crimson reports on Sean Spicer's brief tenure as a fellow at the Kennedy School, in which he said absolutely nothing that participants in his discussions could publicly relate, because he prefaced them all by saying they were off the record:

I was in a classroom session with Spicer and he told the same stories, including several easily refutable lies, that he’s told publicly since leaving the White House (some items were leaked). The classroom session followed the same playbook as his Press Secretary tenure: Dodge hard questions, make a few false statements, attack the media, claim that Trump is treated unfairly, etc. The off the record policy did not make him particularly candid.

An MIT fraternity on Bay State Road had to explain itself before the Boston Licensing Board today for an incident last month in which all non-residents were evacuated after police and fire inspectors found too many people inside, a two-story shower-head waterfall was drenching a marble staircase, and a kid popped open a can of Bud Light. Read more.

Everybody knows about the glass flowers at Harvard's Museum of Natural History, but unless you've actually been there, you may not realize just how many of the sculptures include pests and pestilence. The Harvard Gazette alerts us to a new display:

The group of 78 specimens, marvels of scabbing and rot, also includes pears, plums, and apricots. Only a few of the bunch have been out of storage this century.

Seems Joe Arpaio, convicted of criminal contempt of court (and, yes, later pardoned, but at least so far, the conviction still stands), didn't cotton to a Globe op-ed column by Andrew Crespo, a professor at Harvard Law School, about the case. Arpaio's lawyer sent him a letter demanding he retract the column or face a lawsuit. Crespo tells the lawyer what he can do with his demand.

The Crimson reports that even at Harvard, there are limits to technology and that students in a popular computer-science course have to show up in person again because streaming online lectures just "lacked the dynamism of years past."